How can we help?

Seeing as how there are so many of us patiently (or impatiently!) waiting for the chance to play this wonderful game again after so many years, I have a question for the devs:

How can we help?

Becoming an alpha tester is one way to help get the game up and running, but until enough of the technical problems are out of the way that you can expand the alpha, what can we do to speed the process along (or even just share the work load)? If there were a page on the site or a thread in the forum where you posted "help wanted" ads then maybe some of us could volunteer for specific tasks. Asking us to follow you on Facebook or Twitter doesn't help those of us who don't use either - personally, I don't do social media, so the site and the forum are the only ways I have to keep up with what's going on.

Unfortunately I don't know much about coding, so I wouldn't be able to help with the technical side of things. My background is mainly in communications (mostly as an editor, but I've also done some writing) and admin work, but I'm pretty versatile. I'm insanely meticulous and methodical, and great at a variety of tasks that require patience and attention to detail. I could probably make myself useful if you had any non-technical work to do, and I'd be happy to devote some of my spare time to this project. After all, Glitch is a game truly worth resurrecting.

Anyone else who'd like to volunteer is welcome to offer their services in this thread. Hopefully we can at least support the dev team in their fine work.

Comments

There's a page on the main site (elevengiants.com) that shows how many individuals are currently attached to the development of the game (excluding alpha testers). That list is pretty good size, as you can see. They have turned down various offers of help and cash, so one can only assume they are happy with the current pace, whatever that is. Since the last real blog update was nearly a year ago, it's hard to tell where things are.

Just want to point out that the "Team" page on the website does not indicate who is currently working on Eleven. It shows people that have joined our Slack and contributed something towards the game.

Right now we only have two developers working on the game in their free time (including myself) so development is obviously going to be slow. Money isn't going to help with that. What we really need right now are people who have experience with JavaScript in order to fix bugs and improve server stability so we can open the game to a wider audience. Our game server is publicly available on GitHub (link) and we also have a Slack for development (link, see slack contact) for anyone interested.

As for the blog and communication: We probably aren't communicating as much as we should, and for that we're sorry. Only a handful of people have the ability to post on the blog and honestly we haven't made any major changes since the last blog post. A lot of the fixes we do are minor fixes that implement missing features and improve stability so people don't get stuck outside of the game (this happens a lot, but luckily we have a few dedicated team members on standby ready to fix issues that come up).

We know the wait sucks for the people who aren't able to play, but please remember that we are a small team who are working on the game in our own free time. If you don't have JavaScript experience, all you can really do is hope for an invite to the alpha so you can help us test and make the game more stable.

No worries. I wasn't sure how development was coming along these days, so I figured I'd put the offer out there. Feel free to get in touch if at a later date there's some way I might be able to contribute.

Also, I'll gladly take that alpha spot if you're offering. At the very least I could go bug hunting. :)

I have a suggestion! In between "Official blog posts" with updates what if you allowed alpha testers to write blogs occasionally just talking about game play. Maybe just a "I was in Jethimadh tower recently and it brought back a bunch of memories and here are some screen shots" sort of thing. Something to show people are still active and testing. You could choose someone different each month to highlight something about the game, they could send you their post and screenshots and someone with blog access could post it.

This would give people a sense that things were moving forward even when there are no official updates to give.